1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to a systems, methods and apparatuses that are configured to provide applications style functionality to a user. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to systems and apparatuses that may include a mobile device and/or a server configured to communicate with the mobile device to provide applications style functionality to the user of the mobile device.
2. Description of Related Art
There are several existing methods for implementing software applications on wireless devices. These methods include browser-based applications implemented in mark-up languages such as WML and cHTML, and also stand alone or thick client applications that are typically implemented in JAVA and execute the majority of the application functionality natively within the wireless device.
A browser-based application involves the implementation of an application server that delivers mark-up languages (e.g., HTML), which are then interpreted by a general purpose browser resident on a client device. Browser based applications are relatively easy to implement but generally offer very poor interactivity with the user because of the bandwidth limitations and latency associated with wireless links. While languages such as HTML are powerful and expressive, they do not make efficient use of the bandwidth between an application server and a browser. One reason for this inefficiency is that they are designed to be human readable and as such, are generally represented using alphabetic characters.
Browser based systems suffer from many limitations including significant complexity required to implement basic functionality and extreme slowness arising from the fact that each user input requires an entire page fetch from a server.
A thick client based application involves the implementation of a client program that is fully executed on a client device. JAVA is often used as the language to implement the client software because it is ubiquitously available on wireless devices. Thick client based applications are often augmented by services provided by a ground based server to mediate connectivity to data of interest.
Client based applications are typically much more interactive than browser based applications because code can be executed on the client device which does not involve the latency of the wireless link. However, the thick client approach requires a separate application to be implemented for each new item of functionality that must be either pre-loaded or downloaded prior to use. The need to preload the application considerably reduces the appeal and accessibility of this approach.
A combination of the above is also possible involving the use of a mark-up language in conjunction with a scripting language. This approach is seen typically as a combination of HTML and Javascript. The combination includes the advantages of both approaches but also includes the problems of both approaches.
The present inventors have observed that it would be desirable to provide systems, methods and apparatuses that are configured to provide applications style functionality to a user to overcome some of the disadvantages of prior art systems.